Rad­hi­ca Sookraj

Both Min­is­ter of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Dr Su­ruj Ram­bachan and Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Tim Gopeesingh on Sun­day de­clined to com­ment on re­cent re­ports that the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Coun­cil, head­ed by Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar, had met with Dig­i­cel to get as­sis­tance in tap­ping cell­phones. Asked about the Prime Min­is­ter's meet­ing with Dig­i­cel's Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer Niall Dor­ri­an on Ju­ly 14, Gopeesingh said: "I can say ab­solute­ly noth­ing about that. I can­not com­ment on that." Ram­bachan al­so said it was a mat­ter of na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty and as such he had no in­for­ma­tion on the meet­ing. He added: "I don't know about that. It is out­side my purview."

On Sun­day, the Guardian re­port­ed ex­clu­sive­ly that Gov­ern­ment was at­tempt­ing to im­ple­ment le­gal in­ter­cept ca­pa­bil­i­ties on the Dig­i­cel net­work. The meet­ing was at­tend­ed by Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter John Sandy, Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Em­manuel George, di­rec­tor of the Strate­gic Ser­vices Agency (SSA) Colonel Al­bert Grif­fith and Dig­i­cel's CEO Do­ri­an. Legal­ly in­ter­cept­ing a mo­bile net­work al­lows an in­tel­li­gence agency to lis­ten to calls for pre-as­signed num­bers. In a let­ter to Gov­ern­ment, Dor­ri­an said Dig­i­cel was con­trac­tu­al­ly ob­lig­at­ed to pro­tect the pri­va­cy of cus­tomers and could on­ly de­vi­ate from du­ties where clear­ly re­quired to do so by leg­is­la­tion.

He said Dig­i­cel had of­fered full sup­port but this co-op­er­a­tion had not been rec­i­p­ro­cat­ed by the SSA.

Last week, pres­i­dent gen­er­al of the Oil­fields Work­ers' Trade Union, An­cel Ro­get, ac­cused Gov­ern­ment of tap­ping the phones of trade union­ists who were gear­ing up for a na­tion­al day of strike. Ro­get said, how­ev­er, that the labour com­rades could com­mu­ni­cate ef­fec­tive­ly among them­selves in a man­ner which the Gov­ern­ment could not un­der­stand. Say­ing the na­tion­al strike would be suc­cess­ful Ro­get not­ed that on-go­ing col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing had not yield­ed any of­fers of in­crease be­yond five per cent.